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Lost Ark Planning to Employ Micro-transaction Model That Won't Be P2W

At yesterday's Lost Ark media conference, a 8 minute long gameplay trailer has been released and it looks pretty awesome. In addition, Korean game media Inven did a long interview with SmileGate representative and the Head Director in whch we found some interesting answers regarding Lost Ark's possible business model and more details about the 1st closed beta.

Since Lost Ark has been in development for years and we all know that developing MMORPGs will cost a lot of money. So what type of business mode they'll use is important. On one hand, game developer needs to make money while on the other hand, user experience and feedbacks are also pivotal. Below is what dev's reply to this undecided business model:

Since the 2014 G-STAR, the subscription model was what we heard the most from the users, but we are afraid to say that it will be difficult for us. We are planning to choose a micro-transaction model. Many users wanted the subscription model, but we saw the reason for that was that they were sick of the P2W model of some games. There are many employees in our team, who love the RPG game genre, so we are very aware of this problem. We are not going to choose this kind of micro-transactions. We will make a proper BM, so the players will be able to enjoy our game. We don’t want to disappoint them either. I just want the users to know that we are trying very hard.

The final business model is yet to be decided. It might be free to play with an in-game cash shop but it could also be a buy to play way, like Guild Wars 2 or Black Desert Online. The dev said they are quite aware of the P2W issue so they'll make sure they do a right decision and not disappoint players. It's still unclear how Lost Ark will go considering the P2W issues we see from Black Desert Online now.

Other than that, 8 classes have been revealed so far but dev said they "will be releasing 6 base classes which will have 3 different advancements for each and over 10 classes has been developed." Also as for the game engine, they are not worried about the Unreal Engine 3 they are using now and upgrade to Unreal Engine 4 is doable if necessary.